ABSTRACT
Care is one of the most elementary relations human beings can enter into, especially in later life. This chapter, written from the perspective of humanistic gerontology, offers a critical examination of the cultural imperatives and ideologies implicitly and explicitly informing the praxis of eldercare in the United States. It seeks to complicate prevailing monological and monocultural notions of eldercare as a meeting of culturally homogenous hearts and minds in favor of a more pluralistic, even dualistic, view by adding the perspective of migrant caregivers and by acknowledging how they have become an indispensable part of the eldercare in the United States. Such an acknowledgment involves an attempt to develop an understanding of eldercare as international and intercultural contact zone where the need for care of older Americans and the economic urgencies of migrant caregivers and also their respective cultural and moral certainties intersect and interact. In the perspective of the argument presented here, care is seen as a site for the transposition of relationships that were once a local and kinship affair into an intercultural rencontre of strangers which places the socially and culturally distant right into the private, if not intimate, sphere of people’s homes.
